The "New" AMD's First chipset - 690G

Boards, availability and future moves

Now there was a small selection of boards at the event so I got a sneeky pic or two to show you. Be guaranteed we'll have some in to take a look at very soon.

Very strange seeing the AMD logo on a chipset, but also strangely comforting.

Among the companies that AMD are having as partners are Asus, Foxconn, Gigabyte and MSI. They have a variety of connecters including VGA + DVI, HDMI and VGA and HDMI and DVI. Asus board has an add-in-board for HDMI out as well as some sound options.

At this point it's worth mentioning that AMD have implemented HDCP at a hardware level in the chipset itself. This allows for a hardware routed HDCP output, leaving the only possible source for people not wishing to pay for their protected content being the software that plays the content. This is a step in the right direction for an industry that is struggling to find a place for a PC below the TV.

The key point about the manufacturers is that they can choose what to put in as far as connectivity goes. This means that you will see a wide range of different types of connections (as stated above) depending on the particular vendor.

Also worth noting is the Intel range of integrated graphics will be dubbed as having ATI Radeon X1250 chips in them. We've got one of these babies already so be set for a review soon!

All in all it's all looking pretty rosy for AMD on this release. The chipset is hard launched although AMD did say that you will see much more availability towards the end of April. Another benefit of having ATI on board are the board partners involved. Let's take a look:

Here we see that there's a wider range of partners going for the 690G chipsets than the V, but AMD are looking at a rather large-scale launch for this chipset, very encouraging indeed.

The future

AMD gave us a run-through of their plan for the future. There was talk again of Torrenza and Fusion, AMD's open platform, along with their plans for CPU on GPU and how this could be adapted to many applications.

AMD showed us an interesting slide as well. Not interesting in that it was new but interesting as to what was suggested.

The hint was that the crossbar switch could be enlarged and paired with some "other" type of architecture to produce a single silicon die with several different types of cores on it. This means you could get almost an entire high-performance platform into a single chip.

Also mentioned was having seperate memory controllers for each core and having the ability to not only clock each core seperately, but to be able to switch some off whilst still having others operating. Whilst I cannot really put this down as "official" it is certainly exciting and innovative stuff.

AMD talked a lot about the platform vision and what they want to do with their platform. I don't think I will go into detail here, but there is certainly a wide range of applications that AMD/ATI can turn their hand to from the Digital Home to the High-end Server market.

Lets not also forget that R600 is on the (not-too distant we hope) horizon and AMD are certainly gearing up to get that chip out. With nVidia snapping at their heels one side and Intel voraciously eating up the market on the other AMD have their work cut out, but they look up to the task.

Conclusion

With a lot of negative press about AMD recently and certainly the hardcore enthusiast market switching to Core2Duo there was a lot of encouraging signs from AMD at the conference.

I think the main thing that I was thinking with 690G is that is eases computing that step closer to your living room. Affordable, integrated and high-quality solutions for the digital home is what we need right now and AMD are looking to provide it.

As far as the future is concerned, AMD certainly have a rosy path ahead if some of these innovations come to the fore. Don't count out AMD just yet...look what they did on AMD 64.

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